Demonstrating success

I14

When most people think of politics, they think of electoral politics. So while many of us may think of this in much broader terms as far as measuring winning I think we have to give ourselves things that can be actually measured and [success in] electoral politics in the next two to five years probably wouldn't make sense for any kind of political movement that would develop. So I don't think that that would be on the goal post but it would certainly involve engagement with that political process in some way. So we actually have to be able to win things because that's the only way that we convince people that we can succeed.

Accelerating the collapse

I2

I think that the whole concept of shit hitting the fan is a weird way to refer to a collapse that's already in progress and that's depressing. I feel like there's going to be an acceleration that could be really fast.

Dispelling the myth

I4

I think a major part of what the Left needs to do now is to dispel this myth that capitalism can ever actually create a sustainable future.

Doing it ourselves

I26

We've already been compromised and co-opted…[b]ut out of that…I think movements will continue to grow. Underground movements, grassroots movements...there was a woman I spoke to a few weeks ago, she's from San Francisco, where a huge grassroots midwifery movement took place in the ‘70s and ‘80s and...she said, ‘what do you do when women just start catching each other's babies and no one has titles, and no one has credentials, and no one has equipment, but yet that's what women want, and babies are well, and women are well, what if we just caught each other's babies?’ What would that look like? What message would that give?

Difference and possibility

I19

I think imagination…[is] the ability to think of something different, to enact something different, to believe that something different is possible.

Radical values

I6

I don't want to point to a specific example of an activist initiative and say that this is the guide to the future. My own feeling is that there are values that I think I'd like to see broadened to be values that people can work with. Things like solidarity, affinity, autonomy, cooperation over competition, these sorts of vague themes. And then there are various experiments with those which are sometimes inspiring, like cooperatives. Those sorts of things have those values in them.

The limits of telling a better story

I13

People on the left have this conceit that if only we explained things better to people then the scales would be lifted from their eyes and they would all realize that [the source of their problems is] really capitalism after all. That's not necessarily true….the [first] problem with [this focus on] framing is that it's simplistic….and the world isn't simple. So we rankle at the idea of simplifying things for good reasons. The second reason is that it's not an equal fight, it's not like we're both starting out from the same situation on the right and the left….they're in an open competition and….of course the right has power behind it.

Denigrating youth

I22

You always have the obligatory paragraph or two paragraphs about these youth who we want to disassociate from because we have no problem with the police. So [the 2010] G20 [meetings in Toronto] was an eye opener because the police deliberately attacked people. The police deliberately threatened people in the prisons and people who would normally say, ‘well, it's these youth who bring on the violence of the state because we're decent, orderly people who participate,’ were stunned when they were there. They saw the state attacking people willy-nilly. So I think that was an eye opener and I think that provides the context we consider this in. We have our differences but we can have political unity and we can have discussion about tactics but…[it doesn’t] because [some people] have a denigrating concept of youth.

Prefiguring alternatives, resisting the status quo

I3

We need to organize outside of the current mainstream political structures and create, pre-emptively, alternative ways of organizing and living and generating living, breathing examples of other ways of living. One strategy can't really exist without the other. I think if we organize, if we do our own thing, and yet we completely ignore the mainstream political system and let it turn to fascism then whatever alternative pockets exist might get screwed in the long run and, at the same time, if we just depend on asking [for] reforms of the political system then all we're going to get are scraps all the time and never have any kind of real change before it's too late.

No return

I22

I think the world is pregnant with dangers, to use an unfortunate metaphor, it's pregnant, it's full. War,...[w]e haven't even spoken about...the environmental crisis. People operate in sort of a linear epistemology and what we see with the environmental crisis, it's exponential. So in our lifetimes, ten, fifteen years down the road, it's not short, we could see even greater calamities because who knows how these complex systems interact? So there's all of these issues and so to solve all of these people need to realize that none of these can be solved by believing that...we can go back to the past and that these people [in power] can be pressured into going back into the past because history doesn't work that way.